Yarr! It Be rowyn's Berfday, Mateys!

[the_gneech]

Avast, wench! For ye birthday booty, ye get today's Fergotten English, ahoy!

cucurbitula
A glass vessel which, having its air rarified, gives room for that contained in the part to which it is applied to expand itself, and bring with it such humours as it is involved in.

--Daniel Fenning's Royal English Dictionary, 1775

The curcubitula cruenta is designed to draw blood. The cucurbitula sicca is for dry-cupping, and is a local vacuum apparatus. The cucurbitula cum ferro is armed with iron.

--Edward Lloyd's Encyclopaedic Dictionary, 1895

Feast Day of St. Januarius,
an Italian patron of phlebotomists, who attained sainthood after it was reported, on this date in 1389, that a vial of his coagulated blood had liquefied and bubbled. Under the definition of phlebotomie in An English Expositor (1616), John Bullokar offered this ludicrous explanation for the practice of bleeding: "Phisitions, as it is written, learned this practice first of a beast called hyppopotamus, living in the river Nilus, which being of a raucous nature and therefore often overchared with much eating, is wont to seeke in the banks for some sharp stub of a reede; upon which pricking his leg he thereby easeth his full body, stopping the bleeding afterward with mud."

Well, I'll be keelhauled. Does sirfox know about this?

-The Gneech, me hearties

PS: Avast, ye scuppers! It's D. H. Laarrrrwrence's berfday as well!

Comments

[dhlawrence.livejournal.com]

Arrr, she ain't t'only one who's completin' a round-the-sun voyage today ;)

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Well she's the only one who shows up on the "My LJ" page, which is where I get 'em from. Who else be ye hinting about, ye scalawag?

-The Gneech

[dhlawrence.livejournal.com]

I be sharin' this day with the young lass!

Happy birthday to us!

[rowyn]

And thank ye kindly ta t' Gneech fer wishin' us a good one, too. =)

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

I'm rather terrified at the prospect of possibility of becoming the patron saint of platelets. After all, i've been instrumental in the miracle of getting fairly healthy and workable platelets from the 'death' of freeze-drying.